Guided Practice: Rapport - Matching & Mirroring
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten
that we belong to each other.”
― Mother Teresa
Context of Exercise: In this second rapport exercise you will first practice
matching & mirroring another person to create rapport. You will then be asked to
consciously break rapport once you have established it. The purpose of
practicing breaking rapport is to sharpen your detection skills associated with the
state of rapport. It will also give you the opportunity to re-establish rapport once it
is broken. To be successful in this exercise, start of with just one other individual.
This can be done with a friend or business colleague.
Exercise Steps:
1. Review the characteristics associated with creating rapport. In this
exercise you will want the content of the conversation to be conducive to
creating rapport. This could be exploring some shared beliefs or values
you have with your partner. It could be to explore and build understanding
around a critical business issue that impacts both parties.
2. Set the context of the conversation for your partner. Initiate the
conversation by sharing some revealing information about yourself as you
invite them into the conversation.
3. As your partner begins to share, carefully notice some of their significant
body characteristics (posture is asymmetrical; they use their hands in a
specific way to emphasis points; they tend to use specific words in their
speech patterns; their legs are crossed or held in a particular way, etc.).
4. Begin to slowly adjust your body dynamics to be similar to that of your
partner.
5. Continue to match & mirror their dynamics. Once you believe that you are
comfortably matching body dynamics (in rapport) see if you can subtly
shift one body dynamic in such a way that your partner shifts with you.
This is how you know you are in rapport.
6. Once you are certain that you are in fairly deep rapport with your partner,
make a drastic shift in either your body dynamics or in your demeanor to
your partner. This is intended to break rapport. You may have to
experiment a bit in order to actually break rapport. When you think that
you have actually broken the rapport state, carefully notice the new body
dynamics exhibited by your partner.
7. Once you have successfully broken rapport, your job is to attempt to
regain rapport. This is harder to do once it has been broken and you may
need to resort to some or all of the following tactics:
o Going back and validating some of their highly held values that you
identified during the conversation.
o Coming back to a part of the conversation that seemed to elicit passion
or animation in your partner.
o In some way acknowledging the break in the flow of the conversation
that you may have created and subtly asking to refocus the
conversation
o Again match & mirror their body dynamics.
8. Once you have again re-established rapport you can conclude the
conversation.